Penny's been in a Mood lately. The remnant of the strep throat? The oncoming Twos? Who knows? I hope this wave passes soon, though.

But she might've managed the doorknob trick again, this time with my kitchen pantry door. I'm not sure, though, because neither Matt nor I saw it happen. She was whining and we were otherwise occupied, and suddenly she was pointing up at the box of cookies and saying "Please?". I don't think I'd left the pantry door open, but it's possible. It's also possible that she got it open.

Draft #2 of the proposal's due today. I took it just about as far as I could take it yesterday, actually. I'll go through it this morning and try to clean it up a little, but there are still some gaping holes in it that I can't fill. And some of the rest of it reads quite horribly, but I can't come up with a way to improve it.

So it's going to get turned in like that, and if they don't like it, then maybe they won't ask me to write this crap again.

(Ha. Ha. Ha. That's a little joke. Of course they'll want me to do this again.)

I've been feeling sort of restless and spring-clean-y lately. Only sheer laziness has kept me from the projects I want to do. But I keep getting more and more restless, so I'm pretty sure that one or more of them will take place sometime this month.

I recently went through all my clothes and got rid of all my "fat" clothes. I need to do a little more - I didn't sort through the dressers, just the hanging stuff, and I know I have a bunch of pairs of socks that need to be tossed.

And I want to clear out Penny's toys. She's got these baskets and buckets of toys that she never even looks at anymore. I need to whittle the stuff in the main part of the house down to manageable levels. Pack away the stuff she doesn't play with, throw away the broken stuff, rotate out some of the rest of it...

Then I want to do a purge of the bookshelves. A really vicious one. I don't know how many books we've got in the house, but I'm willing to bet that neither Matt nor I will re-read 80% of them. I'm okay keeping around a few such books because they're attractive, or because Penny might want to read them some day... But the clutter is making me crazy.

And while I'm at it, I want to reorganize the bookshelves. I'd meant to do a neat, attractive organization when we moved in, but it wound up being kind of helter-skelter as I unpacked, and I never went back to re-do it.

Then I want to borrow Braz's power washer and clean down the siding on our house. It's extremely nasty looking. That may be a job for Matt, though. I'm not sure. No, this isn't because my parents just did the same job on their house, though that brought it back to the front of my mind. I've been wanting to do this since Braz got his washer last summer.

(You may offer Matt your sympathies. He's already doing the waterproofing of the deck, when the weather's vaguely clement.)

And I should borrow my dad's electric sander, strip the peeling paint off our porch railing, and re-paint it. This time with weather-resistant paint. Amazing concept, I know.

And in order to get to the railing to paint it, I'll probably have to get out my clippers and trim the bushes in front of the house. They're kind of a mess.

And get rid of the stone border on the central mulch bed, because I don't weed the damn thing anyway, and most of the flowers I planted in there are dead. I'll just let grass grow right up to the tree. No biggie.

That's not even counting the big house projects, like getting a plumber to come out and find and then fix the leak in the upstairs toilet. Or putting the shed under the deck. Or converting the garage into a family room. Or replacing the downstairs carpet with laminate flooring. Or doing any painting or real decorating.

Yep, gonna be busy this summer.

--Liz